Social leadership learning: creating behaviour change at scale

The rise of social leadership learning

18 Oct 2018 / By Vanessa Gavan, Mark Sowden & James Aris

The rise of social leadership learning: driving behaviour and culture change at scale

Despite significant organisational shifts, leadership development has not significantly changed in the last 60 years, still looking a lot like higher education models. Furthermore, in spite of the initial fervour around e-learning, and the predicted death of face-to-face learning, this is yet to come to pass.

Both programmatic and e-learning development tools have their respective merits, the former in its ability to make significant shift to mindsets if executed properly, and the latter in its efficiency and affordability of learning delivery.

However, with increased time pressure on leaders and a continuous drive to do more with less, combined with wear-out and low completion rates of e-learning, there is an opportunity for a new and innovative approach; social leadership learning. Instead of being mandatory and tightly controlled in form and substance, social leadership learning is designed to be voluntary, loose and decentralised. Rather than being dense in content and standardised, it is focused on small habits and allows participants to adapt learnings to their own style, and to start from any point of development. Instead of being organisation led, it is community driven.

In this Whitepaper we explore the principles behind social leadership learning and how it can compliment organisations’ leadership development strategies, brought to life with a case study from ANZ where we worked with them to engage more than half of their leaders organisation-wide.

Only 7% of organisations reported that their leadership development tightly aligns with strategy, enjoys executive support, has cultivated a strong talent pipeline, and demonstrates an impact